Torture victims and tense victors.

T H E RAPE AND RESCUE OE KUWAIT CITYBy Michael Kelly

KUWAIT CITY

One sunny afternoon in the week of liberation, I wentto the theater. The hall at Kuwait University's school ofmusic and drama is a place of conspicuous civilization,a big cantilevered room with modestly elegant bluecloth seats trimmed in gold, rich wood-paneled walls,and a deep, broad stage set above a large orchestra pit.I expected to be alone there but instead found a Brit-ish television crew videotaping the statement of 29-year-old Abdullah Jasman, Kuwaiti citizen. University ofPittsburgh graduate, and victim of a torture session inthis unlikely place. He was standing in the balcony,talking and crying. Here and there, the tile floor wasspotted with drops of dried blood, little trails that wentno place in particular.

"On the stage," Jasman said, pointing to a large sec-tion of steel set scaffolding, "you can see the metalframe. They put you on that, naked, with both legsspread and they spread you open all the way. . . . Theyraped one of my friends here. They raped him. Theywere laughing. They said, 'This is what your Emir didto you. .. .' There were a bunch of us brought here.You sat in these chairs, waiting to be tortured, blind-folded, and couldn't see anything. You'd hear thevoices, loud, and the screaming and begging."

He pulled up his pant legs and showed the camerahis calves, mottled with deep black burn wounds."They put the wires on your legs and put your feet inthe water, so your whole body is electricity," he said."They would put you with the electricity in the waterfor twenty seconds, thirty seconds, and you would gounconscious and they would throw water on you andrevive you, and then do it again." He began crying, inshort, harsh, shuddering sobs, and he could not stopfor many long, videotaped seconds.

After it was over, the British reporter thanked him."It must have been terrible for you to go throughthis," he said. "But it is important. Your story isreally something else." Actually, the terrible thingis, it really wasn't. It was as common as sand in Ku-wait. It was, in one variation or another, simply thestory of living in Iraq's 19th Province for sevenmonths under the rule of Saddam Hussein.

MICHAEL KELLY is TNR'S special correspondent in theGulf region.

One of the new, post-liberation pieces of graffiti hereis a two-foot-high, three-foot-long message in red spraypaint on a concrete wall, along the formerly lovely GulfStreet, amid the debris of the Iraqi army's elaborateand worthless beachfront defenses. It reads: "DiartyIraqis." Apart from the slight misspelling, it is a com-mendable statement: accurate, succinct, and re-strained. What the Iraqi forces did to this place wasprofoundly dirty; was filthy, vile, obscene; was one long,vast crime.

The city the Iraqis left behind appeared to havebeen worked over by a huge army of drunken teen-age vandals. They stole everything they could, fromair conditioners to cigarettes, in a citywide smashand grab. The huge and superb medical library at thecity's teaching hospital, Mubarak Al-Katib, was stolenin its entirety. So was the library at Kuwait Univer-sity, along with the school's big mainframe computersand everything else worth a cent. Standing near thelibrary, where a few thousand bedraggled books (Hen-ry the Fifth, The Italian Renaissance and its Histori-cal Background, etc.), along with hundreds of thou-sands of index cards, remained scattered on thefloor, Omar Samman, an 18-year-old student, de-scribed the looting: "They came in with lorries andtook everything—the computers, the books, the car-pets, the chairs, the keyboards, the carrels, the micro-phones, the podiums. It took them nearly a wholemonth, with men in lorries every day, before they gotit all."

What the Iraqis could not steal, they destroyed, in anastonishingly savage and thorough rampage. Theytorched every major hotel, the banks, car dealerships,almost every store in the downtown shopping district, ascore of major office buildings, the fishing marina andall its boats, the National Museum, and a great dealmore. They ruined the beachfront with lines of concer-tina wire, bunkers, pillboxes, and mines, and turnedGulf Street's luxury apartment buildings into high-risebunkers, cinderblocking the windows into gun ports.They shot up and burned down the Emir's office andresidential palaces, as well as the parliament building,smashing the windows and doors and breaking the fur-niture for kicks.

Kuwaitis were stunned by the Iraqi soldiers' habit of

20 THE NEW REPUBLIC MARCH 25,1991

turning every place they went into a sty. At Kuwait Uni-versity every office, it seemed, was ankle- to calf-deep indebris; the contents of desks and files dumped onfloors, paintings ripped from walls, chairs and tablesoverturned. In one room was a great pile of gold- andazure-trimmed academic robes, sodden and stinking ofurine. At the Al-Ahadat police station, which the Iraqisconverted into one of many makeshift prisons, as manyas 200 men were locked in one 30-by-30-foot room, withno beds or blankets. The prisoners slept on a filthy tilefloor and used scraps of styrofoam for pillows. As else-where, the Iraqis' own living quarters in the prisoncontained layer on layer of grime; half-eaten, rottingplates of food fiung into corners, trash and garbagecovering the fioors, graffiti ("Hosni Mubarak is a Sonof a Bitch") coveringthe walls, the stenchof feces and urineheavy in the air.

It is the human fac-tor that hurt most,though. The Iraqiforces treated thepeople here as theydid the property.They trashed them."They killed the peo-ple and threw theirbodies in the dirt,"said District AttorneyNassar Seleh. ' 'Theykilled the people likethey were chickens."

When I first gothere, a day and a halfafter most of the Iraqitroops had fied in themiddle of the night,and a day after Ku-waiti troops had en-tered, I met on theroad into town apolite, middle-agednewspaper writer named Abdullah Al-Khateeb. He ledme to a grubby little piece of ground, a few blocks fromhis home, and across the street from a building wherethe Iraqi state security agents had one of their head-quarters. We walked about twenty yards in from thesidewalk. Behind us, the street was filled, as it would befor days, with uproarious celebration; gunshots, horns,shouts, and whistles, and dark-robed women ululat-ing—the high-pitched series of rapid tongue and glot-tal stops that is an Arab noise of public emotion. Westopped by a bloody red and white kefiyeh, the Arabman's commonwear headdress. Next to it were two setsof scuff marks in the dirt, and two big patches of rusty,dried blood.

"Here," said Khateeb, pointing, "is where the twoboys kneeled. And here, to the side, is where theIraqis stood. They shot the boys here, one with a

IRAQI SOLDIERS SURRENDER TO U S . MARINESINSIDE KUWAIT (ABC NEWS PHOTO)

pistol in the forehead, and one with a pistol in theback of the head. The boys died here."

Abdul Rahman Al-Awadi, Kuwait's minister of statefor cabinet affairs, claims that 33,000 people disap-peared since August 2. The Iraqis are reliably estimatedto have taken as many as 20,000 prisoners to Iraq toserve as slave laborers, and another 5,000 to 5,000 ashostages and shields in the days just before the alliedground offensive. By the minister's reckoning, thatwould put the number of murdered between 8,000 and10,000. This figure is improbable, but not wildly so.The precise number was still being worked out at theend of the first week of liberation, but it was clear bythe evidence that it would amount to at least a coupleof thousand. The dead were everywhere.

In a cemetery inthe southern subur-ban district of Rigga,mass graves, each re-portedly containingseven or eight menor boys, stretchedfor long rows. Ceme-tery workers said theslots contained about1,000 bodies. Thereare ten major hospi-tals in Kuwait City,and all report havinghandled atrocity vic-tims. At Mubarak Hos-pital, one of thecity's largest, the chiefof surgery. Dr. Abdul-lah BehlDehani, saidthat from late Augustthrough October hisemergency room re-ceived groups of fiveto ten corpses almostevery day. At theAl-Amira Hospital, Dr.Sabah Al-Hadeedi

said he can document, with photographs and finger-prints, thirty-eight executions.

Subhi Younis, an ambulance driver and the chiefmorgue attendant at Sabah Hospital, said he had han-dled at least 400 and perhaps as many as 700 executedbodies over the seven-month occupation. One day, hesaid, forty-five bodies came in; another day, seventy. Ondays like that, the twenty-two refrigerated steel drawersin the morgue would fill quickly, and bodies would belaid out in a bloody, twisted carpet on the tile fioor andthe courtyard outside. When I visited, the morgue wasstill home to seven or eight unclaimed victims.

The corpse in drawer 12 had been burned to deathwith some fiammable liquid. The body was curled like afetus, and what remained of the head was still barelyrecognizable as a skull, but a skull that seemed to have

continued on page 24

MARCH 25, 1991 THE NEW REPUBLIC 21

been slathered in a brown viscous material and thenbaked in a kiln. It was received by the hospital on Octo-ber 9, and its identity was unknown.

The corpse in drawer 16 was that of a handsome manwith a full, proud black beard. His white shirt wasstiff with clotted blood, as were his hair, beard, ears,lips, and nostrils. He had been shot twice, execution-style, in the head and chest. He was brought in onFebruary 19, and he was also labeled unknown. Twomen looking for a lost relative peered down at him."That's not who I want," said one of the men. "But Iknow him. I can't remember the name, but I know theface. He lived in the neighborhood." He sighed andshrugged. "What can you do?"

The corpse in drawer 3 had its yellowed hands tiedbehind its back with a strip of white rag. The body hadbeen beaten from the soles ofthe feet to the crown ofthehead, which had been stoved in by a club, the apparentcause of death. The legs were covered with deep purpleand black bruises, some six inches or more long, and thechest was scored with a cross-hatch of purple welts.

The corpse in drawer 17 had been so badly burned itdid not look like a body at all. It looked like somethingyou might find on the beach on an early morning walk,in the smoldering remains of a driftwood fire. It camein on November 3; unknown.

Corpses 18 and 19 were two brothers. Amir Abbas andHanza Abbas, brought in on January 20. Excited by thethought of the land war, the young Abbas men reported-ly had led a small, bloody insurrection against an Iraqipolice station in their suburban neighborhood. TheirIjodies came in with those of five of their neighbors, whowere rounded up and killed for good measure, hospitalofficials said. Those men had been shot in the head, andAmir's eye sockets were bloody holes. "We believe theeyeballs were plucked out with fingers while he wasalive," said Saba Hospital surgeon Ali Nassar Al-Serafi,with a sorry litde shake of his head.

D rs. Behbehani and Hadeedi charted, in the pre-cise way of professional accountants of casual-ties, the patterns of death. The first pattern ischronological, with the execution of civilians

beginning several weeks after the August 2 invasion, inresponse to resistance efforts, and drastically increasingfrom mid-September on, after Saddam Hussein's broth-er-in-law, Ali Hassan Majid, arrived as the new governor.Majid reportedly brought in squads of trained killersfrom the Iraqi state security agency, the Mukhabarat."The executions began in earnest after they sent in thespecial execution squads from Baghdad," said Dr. Beh-behani. "We started seeing a lot of young men betweenthe ages of 17 and 32. They arrived, not as patients tocare for, but as bodies to bury."

The second pattern is one of style, identical in almostevery case. After arrest, a victim would be imprisonedand interrogated for several days or weeks. Upon re-lease, sometimes secured with bribes solicited from thefamily, the prisoner would be returned home and shotin the head, neck, or heart, in front of family members.

Alternatively, his body, with ankles and hands bound,would be deposited near his home. The families weregenerally barred from retrieving the bodies from thestreet or doorstep until the next day, so that manymight see them, and fear.

The third pattern was one of even worse brutality."There started in late September something more se-vere. We started getting mutilated and tortured bodies.Not simply shot, but eyeballs taken out, heads smashed,bones broken," said Dr. Behbehani. "You would seeheads that were completely unvaulted, with no brainsin the skull, or multiple fractures in each arm, or severeburns in the face and body, or fingernails removed."

' 'The signs of torture I saw from the thirty-eight execu-tions this hospital handled were electrical burns, wherewires had been put on the chest wall and near the geni-tals, and cigarette burns anywhere on the body, massivebruising, and non-lethal bullets in the shoulders, knee-caps, hip, and legs," he said. At about the same time, thedoctors also began seeing more cases involving women,often raped and mutilated before death. "In Novembera woman I know personally was brought in," Dr. Behbe-hani recalled.' 'The top of her head was gone and bulletswere in her chest." Sitting at his desk, a neat, polishedman refiected in a neat, polished surface, the doctorwept. "She was—my God—she was completely mutilat-ed. There was no brain inside her skull. Why should theytake her brain? Why do such a thing?"

R ape and torture not resulting in death were alsocommon. Almost everyone I talked to in fourdays had a story of some friend or relative beingso abused. One day a man handed me his busi-

ness card, which said he was Bassam Eid Abhool, assis-tant electrical engineer at Kuwait International Airport.His fingernails were perhaps one-eighth of an inchlong; tiny, soft, fragile little strips of ragged cuticle."Ah, you see my fingers," said Abhool. "Iraqis, ofcourse." His story was typical: picked up at randomwalking in his neighborhood; taken to a police sta-tion; hung upside down naked; beaten, tortured, inter-rogated; released with a warning. Much of the ques-tioning was political. "They would say, 'You know whatyour Emir do for your people? Marry 200 women andtake all your money—is this not true?' I would say, 'Idon't know.' They would say, 'The Iraqi people havecome to give freedom to people of Kuwait; is this nottrue?' I would say, 'I don't know.' "

On Abhool's second day in prison, his interrogatorsgot down to serious work. "Two guys take my hands andthey close my eyes, and they take the pliers and they takeout, one by one, my fingernails. Then they put my fingersin water with salt," Abhool recalled in a soft, dispassion-ate voice. On the third day, his captors crushed his fin-gertips with the pliers, but on the fourth day they let himgo. "Later, I see them in supermarket, and they say,'How are your fingers, are they good?' I say, 'No, they arenot good.' They say, 'Come back to the police station, wewill make them good.' They laugh and laugh."

There was real resistance here, and it was never com-

24 THE NEW REPUBLIC MARCH 25, I 991

pletely overcome. Dr. Hadeedi and his colleagues en-tered wounded resistance fighters into the hospital ascar accident victims to fool Iraqi watchers and hid anentire fifty-bed ward and operating theater in threebasement storerooms. Five-person resistance cellsworked in a loose food and money distribution networkthat provided those in need with staples and cash everyweek. Some people fought with arms up to the end,despite an Iraqi policy of collective reprisals that meanthalf a dozen Kuwaiti deaths for every Iraqi death. Afavored tactic was to invite a lonely Iraqi soldier hometo dinner and at evening's end stab him and bury him.

But for most people here the seven months weremostly a time for hiding. The post-liberation boasts ofopposition were often about how the rich hired cranesto put their Ferraris on their rooftops, how every neigh-borhood was stripped of street signs and house num-bers, how valuables were secreted in backyards andyoung men in cubbyholes.

The liberation was, above all, a release from the grind-ing daily horror of hiding. I went to the street where theIraqi governor, Aii Hassan Majid, had lived in a comman-deered mansion. The women who lived across the streethadn't been outside in months, because of fear of theIraqi guards who leered at them. Two women, one older,the other just 18, showed photographs of themselves frombefore the invasion, portrait shots in full hairdo and make-up. "Look at us now," said the older one. "We are uglynow. Look at our clothes. We could not wash." "Look atmy hair," said the younger one, holding out a tousledrope of henna-rich auburn. "It is terrible, is it not?"

The release from captivity took the form of thatmost pleasant of releases, a party. The bash be-gan unexpectedly, early in the morning of Feb-ruary 26. "We woke up and saw the Kuwaiti flag

flying from the police station," said Nassar Seleh. "Youcannot imagine our feelings when we realized the Iraqitroops had gone from the city. In the night we had heardthe tanks moving in the street, and we had dared hopethey were going. But to wake up and find all of themgone—the city is ours again!"

Suddenly everyone was a rebel. The streets werefilled with young men firing rifles and pistols, makingthe celebration almost as dangerouse as the battle forliberation itself. Early reports cited six such deaths inthe first two days; I know of three, whose fresh graves Ivisited in Sulaibikhat Cemetery. "Abdullah Jassim, WhoDied For Kuwait," read the stone on the mound of aman hit on top of the head by a falling round.

Suddenly everyone could be brave. People tore theIraqi license plates from their cars; two days before, thathad been a jailing offense. They displayed photographsof the Emir, wrote anti-Saddam graffiti ("Saddam,Pushed By Bush"), waved Kuwaiti fiags, shouted "KillSaddam!"; those had all formerly been hanging of-fenses. One car sported twenty-three photos of Kuwait'sleader, his smiling face plastered on the trunk, hood,and windows, all of it festooned with bright gold andsilver Christmas tree garlands. Pick-up trucks dragged

effigies of Saddam by the neck through the streets, and agroup of laughing teenage boys led a skinny white don-key labeled "Saddam" down the boulevard.

At Al-Amiri Hospital a long line of cars queued up totake souvenir shells from an Iraqi anti-aircraft gun, andfamilies posed for pictures next to it. In a heavy rainstorm four young women sat in a row on the trunk ofan Impala, having made a seat by knocking out the rearwindow. They waved to the crowd like princesses, andyelled over and over, "I am Kuwaiti! I am Kuwaiti!"

For Americans the party offered the novel sensationof being adored in a foreign land. An Americancouldn't pay for anything that week in Kuwait, couldn'twalk ten feet without being stopped to accept thanks,couldn't talk to anyone without getting an invitation todinner or lunch. "Welcome, soldiers, you are wel-come" three litde girls in party frocks serenaded theU.S. Marines at the newly reopened American Embassy."George Bush, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,very, very good," an old man offered. Two womenjumped from a car to proffer a daisy and a tray of cook-ies. "Thank you! Thank you! And thank Mr. Bush,"said one. "Welcome to your country," said the other.

At one raucous do, centered on three Kuwaiti armoredpersonnel carriers whose crews stood unusually erect inthe manner of young men posing for posterity, four teen-age girls wearing sweaters covered with photos of Bush,John Major, and Margaret Thatcher (each framed withlittle red and gold and silver spangles) worked the crowdof American soldiers and reporters with their autographbooks. I wrote, self-consciously, "To Maha, on a wonder-ful day, 3-1-91," under an inscription from a "CaptainHenry Douglas: 'To a lovely Kuwaiti girl.' "

There were few Iraqis left in Kuwait City againstwhom retribution could be exacted. But on theoutskirts of town I did see one scene of ven-geance—pretty much the last thing I saw there.

Five days after liberation I drove up the road towardsouthern Iraq, the route Saddam's soldiers had taken infiight. Every fifty or 100 yards there was a fresh kill fromthe slaughter the allied forces visited on the fieeing Ira-qis. From each charred and trashed vehicle the belong-ings of the dead Iraqi driver and the dead Iraqi soldier-passengers were spread in a dirty plume on the asphalt.

Most of the bodies had been carted away, but a fairnumber remained. At every spot where there was stillan Iraqi corpse, a crowd had gathered. Every few min-utes a new group would approach, and someone wouldpull the blanket down to see the enemy's face. Thecorpses were already decomposing, their faces yellowand black and green, their features melting togetherunder a buzzing of flies. One by one the Kuwaitismoved cautiously forward and paid their last re-spects. One middle-aged man bent down, over half of amachine-gunned body wedged upside down in the driv-er's seat of a stolen Toyota. He spat, carefully, on theface. His friend got it all on videotape. They pulled theblanket back up and got in their car, heading up theroad to spit on the next of the waiting dead. •

MARCH 25,1991 THE NEW REPUBLIC 25